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Women’s rights advocate Sally Armstrong promoted to officer of the Order of Canada

After returning from Sarajevo in 1993, Sally Armstrong said she urgently told a large news agency in Toronto about rape camps affecting thousands of women during the Bosnian war.

Her hope was that the agency, which she declined to identify, would write a story quickly but she said an editor there said he was on deadline and that he didn’t have the time.

With thousands of women affected, Armstrong couldn’t let the issue go and wrote the story for Homemakers magazine that year — a move that pushed dozens of other media outlets to follow suit.

“He said it was a good story but said things like he was busy, he was on deadline, he forgot,” Armstrong said. “I replied, ‘20,000 women are affected — some eight years old, some 80 years old — and you forgot, you didn’t have the time.’ And he said, ‘Oh Sally, you are always going on about the women.’ ”

Over the span of 43 years, Armstrong has spoken to countless women and girls across the world to share their stories and make people aware of forgotten or ignored issues. She has produced stories for televisions, magazines and newspapers, as well as published books.

In 1998, Armstrong was appointed as a member of the Order of Canada, which recognizes outstanding achievement, dedication to the community and service to the nation.

On Friday, Armstrong was promoted to officer in the Order for her groundbreaking work “highlighting human rights and the struggles of women in the world’s conflict zones,” said a news release from the Governor General.

“I am thrilled and honored,” Armstrong said in an interview. “I feel strongly about the motto of the Order of Canada, which is to seek a better country, I was very honored to be on that list with all those people.”

Armstrong said she’s deeply invested in the work she produces. The people she has met during her journalism career are always on her mind even after their story is written out and published.

“They play on the back of my eyelids,” Armstrong said. “I often remember them and wonder how they are getting along but in my job, I can often go back and interview the same people again and find out and that encourages me.”

Armstrong has travelled to Afghanistan, Bosnia, Iraq and several other regions to learn about the issues women face and how they overcome war, poverty and struggle.

Early in her career, she said, people were not as interested in issues women face. But now she is seeing a change. In her 2013 book Ascent of Women, she writes of the global shift to advance women’s rights.

“It’s important to know,” she said. “We need to learn about things we never knew before because when you don’t know something then you are not bothered to take action. But once you know something you have to ask, ‘what is my role?’ ”

Anna MacQuarrie, Armstrong’s daughter, said that her mother’s passion for social justice issues was always a presence in their home and influenced her deeply.

“She breathes these stories, it drives everything she does,” said MacQuarrie, who is a director at an international organization fighting for the rights of people with disabilities.

“She really believes in women’s rights and making sure that people are safe and equal and there is a justice in the world. She sees storytelling and sharing as a step towards justice.”

Before becoming a journalist, Armstrong worked as a physical education teacher for six years. Her ability to work with kids and knowledge of hundreds of games has helped her throughout her journalism career, she said.

She interviewed a woman several times for her story about the rape camps in 1993. She would visit the woman’s home on the border between Croatia and Serbia and would teach the children how to play new games and gymnastics stunts after she finished her interviews to distract them.

More than 20 years later, several of the children, all grown up now, found her on social media and told her all that they remembered of those times, saying she reminded them of “darkness, explosions, fear and games.”

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Armstrong has worked with dozens of publications in Canada, and will have her work published in a future edition of the Toronto Star looking at the current situation in Afghanistan.

Her recent coverage for the United Church Observer of the persecution faced by Iraq’s minority Yazidi population won Amnesty International’s award for online journalism.

“Sally is very driven by the issues that she cares about,” said the magazine’s publisher/editor Jocelyn Bell. “Some journalists are more interested in how they have beautifully crafted a phrase or something but Sally is somebody who is passionate about these global issues and how they affect women and that’s what drives her.”

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